When incidents such as natural disasters, crime investigations, and wildfires occur, responding to these incidents effectively can save lives, prevent damage, and limit injuries. To prepare for, prevent, respond to, and recover from incidents, the National Incident Management System (NIMS) was developed. NIMS can provide a consistent nationwide approach for all levels of government to work together regardless of cause, size, or complexity. NIMS can include an Incident Command System (ICS) which standardizes incident organizational structure for on-scene management of incidents. The ICS is an example where user groups of users are established. It can incorporate a Unified Command (UC) approach, whereby individuals can be designated by their jurisdictional authorities to jointly determine objectives, plans and priorities, as well as work together to execute them.
During incident preparation and/or response, there is a need to rapidly align all electronic communication (e.g., PTT, Video, Conferencing, Voice, Imaging, Data, etc.) with the ICS organizational chart, which is a role-based hierarchy of groups of one or more users, where each user group is associated with the same role. Communication groups are assigned to each user group. In one example, responders performing the same role at the incident are assigned, or affiliated, to the same primary communication group. This primary communication group facilitates communication between all responders performing the same role. One or more responders in each group may be further designated as a leader of that group. As a group leader, such users must also monitor, or scan, the primary communication groups of hierarchical user groups subordinate and peer to their own; such groups are referred to as the leader's secondary communication groups. This permits the leader to maintain situational awareness of the user groups subordinate and peer to him or her in the hierarchy. These primary and secondary communication group assignments must then be dynamically programmed into the applicable narrowband and/or broadband communication devices carried by the responders. Currently, these devices must be manually programmed with these group configurations. This can be a slow process and subject to error, costing valuable time during an emergency. Similarly, situations outside of incident response exist where a set of communication devices associated with users arranged into hierarchical user groups are to be programmed with primary and secondary communication groups.
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The apparatus and method components have been represented where appropriate by conventional symbols in the drawings, showing only those specific details that are pertinent to understanding the embodiments of the present invention so as not to obscure the disclosure with details that will be readily apparent to those of ordinary skill in the art having the benefit of the description herein.